Vie et mort de l'illustre Grigori Efimovitch Raspoutine
2012 · 10m · France
Directed by Céline Devaux
Genres: animation, biography, historical
Tones: dark, mythic, theatrical
A rhyming narrator recounts the dark career of Rasputin, the wandering monk who bewitched his way into the court of the last Russian Tsars.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A rhyming narrator + Russian history + animation should be a disaster, but Devaux somehow makes the absurdity *work*—though I suspect she's doing something too formally clever for her own good, and that bugs me a little.
Devaux situates herself deliberately in a lineage of literary animation and historical tableau—the rhyming conceit, the mythic register, the formal restraint—and executes with the kind of considered precision that makes you feel the weight of the form.
The choice to let the narrator carry the entire moral and emotional weight while animation becomes pure visual gloss is either inspired or a cop-out, and it's the specificity of *that* gamble—not the budget—that makes it land.
Reviews
Cette création musicale est l'œuvre originale de Flavien Berger, et accompagne chaque image et chaque mouvement des personnages en créant une atmosphère juste, tantôt légère, tantôt inquiétante. Le tout savamment alimenté par une musique originale et un texte non dépourvu d'humour.